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Bindusara

Mauryan Emperor

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ315526
Source-derived summary

Bindusara (r. c. 297 – c. 273 BCE) was the second Mauryan emperor of Magadha in ancient India. The ancient Greco-Roman writers called him Amitrochates, a name likely derived from his Sanskrit title Amitraghāta ("slayer of enemies").

Bindusara was the son of the dynasty's founder Chandragupta and the father of its most famous ruler Ashoka. His life is not documented as well as the lives of these two emperors. Much of the information about him comes from legendary accounts written several hundred years after his death. Bindusara consolidated the empire created by his father.

The 16th century Tibetan Buddhist author Taranatha credits his administration with extensive territorial conquests in southern India, but some historians doubt the historical authenticity of this claim.

Background

Ancient and medieval sources have not documented Bindusara's life in detail. Much of the information about him comes from Jain legends focused on Chandragupta and the Buddhist legends focused on Ashoka. The Jain legends, such as Hemachandra's Parishishta-Parvan were written more than a thousand years after his death.

Editorial summary

“Bindusara” enters the record as mauryan Emperor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bindusara, Mauryan and Emperor can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 170-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The linked authority record independently contributes the date -0320-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Bindusara, Mauryan and Emperor.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Bindusara” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Bindusara, Mauryan and Emperor provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q315526. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Bindusara”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Bindusara primary sources, Bindusara archive and Bindusara research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Bindusara”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Bindusara” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.